This is John Batcher, conversation with Ronan Wordsworth a colleague at

Geopolitical futures about Russia operating alongside Niger-Male Burkina Faso

against jihadists in the region of West Africa.

What are the jihadists won?

How do they maintain their posture in these countries, wild countries, being chased by Russian mercenaries

and indigenous forces of Niger Burkina Faso and Mali.

Ronan explains its shakedown, its mob tactics, its ungoverned spaces.

Here's Ronan Wordsworth to explain this three-part drama, the Russian mercenaries, Africa Corps, the military juntas that have overthrown

the governments in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, and the jihadists, both ISIS and al-Qaeda, on the run except when.

Here's Ronan. More of this later.

So they continue to hold the same sort of line which is to fight against the the central governments there.

They extract wealth from the local communities especially in these ungoverned spaces

particularly across the cell held there, there's like large areas of desert

which do not have the government forces and the government doesn't have the ability to actually

to protect these communities. And so these Islamic groups are basically committing terrorist attacks. They attack a lot of government forces. They also have anti-Russian ideology as well, but they're much more in line with the classic ISIS ideology, say, of their own independent aims are spreading radical Islamic extremism and also extracting

wealth to fund their activities.

So they attack the military groups, whether it's the defense forces or the Russians there

to try and obtain their weapons and diminish their strength,

but also they extract from the local communities

through, and they are very heavily

involved in the smuggling trade through the region there where that's

people smuggling whether that's illicit arms goods drug trade things like that they can all flow up through the Sahel region there and

...